March 2024

Researchers from the University of St. Andrews in the UK, led by Professor Ifor Samuel and Professor Eli Zysman-Colman, identified the key processes controlling the efficiency of TADF OLED emitters under high brightness. This could assist material develops on their quest to design materials that maintain high efficiency at high brightness.

The researchers explain that OLEDs have lower efficiency at higher brightness, and in many TADF materials, the efficiency roll-off is severe, so that the high efficiencies achieved at very low brightness are not maintained at higher brightnesses needed for displays or lighting applications. For the first time, the researcher identified the key processes controlling the triplet population, and propose a figure of merit for efficiency roll-off.  

The European New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), an independent (and voluntary) automotive safety body is set to introduce new rules in January 2026 that will require vehicles to go back to physical controls rather than touchscreens in order to achieve the NCEP five-star safety rating.

NCAP says that car makers are overusing touchscreens, to the point where almost all key controls of the cars (such as HVAC, wipers, hazard lights and more) are now done via the touchscreen rather than by physical knobs, dials, and buttons. Drivers are reportedly complaining that this is annoying - but also dangerous as it diverts your attention from driving into looking to the screen, to go over menus and choices.

In January 2024 we reported that Samsung Display and LG Display have started to produce AMOLED displays for Apple's future iPads, to be announced later this year. Earlier expectations were for Apple to order a total of 10 million iPad AMOLED displays in 2024 from both LGD and SDC, with LGD getting around 60% of the orders. 

Apple was aiming to launch the new OLED iPads this month, but have now reportedly delayed the release to May, as Samsung is suffering from low yields for the 11" AMOLED panels, mostly due to the tandem stack architecture.

Omdia released its small and medium (9-inch and lower) AMOLED market share information for 2023, saying that even though Samsung's market share was lower than 50% for the first time, it stills leads the market by a large margin, with a 43% market share. 

Samsung is followed by BOE (15%), LG Display (10%), Visionox (9%) and Tianma (8%). The total market reached 842 million units, a growth of 11% over 2022. Omdia says that the China-based OLED makers have been expanding their capacity and improving the quality of the produced panels, and are securing orders from domestic smartphone brands. 

Xiaomi announced a strategic partnership with Lumilan, an OLED materials developer. Lumilan, with support from Xiaomi, built a new R&D lab in Ningbo, China, to develop new materials targeting smartphone display applications.

Xiaomi aims to get early access (or perhaps exclusive access) to novel OLED material to enhance its competitiveness. It is likely that the two companies aim to develop new OLED stack materials and perhaps new OLED emitters (Lumilan already develops TADF emitters).

A report from China suggests that Samsung will not produce any AMOLEDs for the upcoming Apple iPhone SE 4, as the Korean maker asked for around $30 per unit (6.1-inch) which was too high for Apple. Apple apparently wanted to pay only $25, and it is estimated that BOE will supply most of the units, with some orders perhaps going to Tianma.

According to reports, Samsung estimated that it will not be able to make a profit in this project and decided to stop the negotiations when Apple insisted on a low price.

UK-based OTFT display backplane developer SmartKem announced that it signed a collaboration agreement with based PMOLED-maker RiTdisplay, for the production of OTFT-based AMOLED displays. SmartKem further said that Innovate UK and the Taiwanese Ministry of Economic Affairs will support this project with a grant of around $530,000.

Smartkem will provide its proprietary OTFT materials to RiTdisplay to integrate within its OLED displays. If successful, the project will create the world's first commercially ready AMOLED display made using organic transistors, which will outperform RiT's PMOLEDs with higher brightness, lower power consumption and higher resolutions. Both companies hope that the project will be completed in 2026. 

OLED lighting developer OLEDWorks announced that it has been awarded a $8.6 million US army project to develop high-performance OLED microdisplays for consumer and defense applications. The display is targeted specifically towards head-mounted display applications in the AR and VR markets.

OLEDWorks says that its microdisplay platform offers high brightness, full color, and excellent lifetime. The company says that it is developing three OLED microdisplay products. The company's displays are based on OLEDWorks' proprietary multi-stack (3, 4, and 5-stacks) OLED technology to OLED microdisplays.

China-based CEOLED launched a new interactive navigator robot, the RK-O55-LTPA, that sports a 55" transparent OLED display.

The robot is designed to create a new to engage with digital content, in public spaces. It offers a 8-hour battery life, intelligent navigation capabilities, and more. 

In July 2023, Audi unveiled the upcoming 2024 Audi Q6 e-tron, with its second-gen OLED taillight technology. The new taillight lighting system use a total of 360 individual OLED panels built into 6 different lighting panels (each made from 60 OLED panels, or segments as Audi calls them), and is able to show warnings and signals to other drivers. Audi now released a nice video showing the new OLED taillight modules in action:

Audi will ship the cars with 8 pre-configured digital light signatures, and customers will be able to add their personal light signatures using the myAudi app. The OLEDs are likely produced by OLEDWorks, like all of Audi's recent OLED panels.